Ayad Allawi says a member of his party is being detained by the notoriously brutal security forces loyal to Nouri al-Maliki, whose grip on power is tightening

Najim al-Harbi, then the mayor of Muqtadiya, walks with General David Petraeus in this July 2008 photo. Damir Sagolj/Reuters

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has accused Iraqi security
forces of imprisoning and torturing a political opponent of current
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, part of an alleged effort to frame
Allawi as a sponsor of terrorism. Allawi, in an interview with TheAtlantic.com, presented as
evidence a letter that he said was from Najim al-Harbi, a member of his
own political party. The letter describes months of detention and brutal
mistreatment by government forces, who told Harbi they would relent if
he accused Allawi of organizing terrorist attacks against the Iraqi
government. Though allegations of abuse have swirled around Maliki's
tightly controlled security forces for years, Allawi's charge of a
political conspiracy is unprecedented.

Allawi and Maliki were on
opposing sides of a months-long political crisis in Iraq after their
respective political parties nearly tied the March 2010 national
elections. Though the stalemate ended in November with Maliki retaining
the Prime Minister's office, the split has raised tension and distrust
in Baghdad politics. Allawi's allegations and Harbi's letter are
impossible to verify, but the former Prime Minister's accusations
against his own government reveal the level of animosity and suspicion
that remain in Iraqi politics.

Last fall, after losing the
premiership to Maliki in a post-election contest of back-room coalition
building, Allawi stood aloof from the gritty politics of government
formation, preferring to spend time in London and other foreign capitals
in a sort of self-imposed exile reminiscent of Al Gore's bearded soul-searching following the 2000 elections. Allawi felt he had been robbed. A
power-sharing agreement was supposed to give him a high-level post in
Maliki's administration. Instead, Maliki had cherry-picked allies from
Allawi's coalition, sidelined Allawi himself, and consolidated power.

Allawi
finally returned to Baghdad shortly after I had left. I had written him
several weeks earlier requesting an interview, and he agreed to a phone
call. Our conversation, part of Allawi's entrance back onto the
political stage, consisted mostly of accusations against the prime
minister. But when I asked Allawi about his exclusion from the
government, he brushed the topic aside. Instead, the former prime
minister accused Maliki of using his control of the armed forces to
intimidate, arrest, and even torture his political opponents.

"The Parliament is being terrorized," Allawi told me.

I
had heard such charges before. For the past four years, Maliki's
opponents have decried his growing control of Iraq's security forces. In
the capital, both the army and the police now answer to the Baghdad
Operations Command, which is led by a general who receives his orders
not through the Ministry of Defense or Interior but from the office of
the Prime Minister. Maliki's office also directly funds and commands
U.S.-trained counter-terrorism forces, which many Iraqis have nicknamed
the "dirty brigades." With so much power in Maliki's hands, critics
often accuse him of using it to intimidate and coerce his political
rivals. But in the past, when I asked Members of Parliament for
evidence, they retreated into generalities. Not so with Allawi.

He
had just received a letter, he said, from Najim al-Harbi, an alleged
victim of Maliki's abuse. Harbi had run for Parliament in Allawi's
coalition, campaigning as a vocal critic of Maliki. Then, on February 7,
2010, he was arrested. Harbi won the March election anyway, despite
being imprisoned for the last month of the campaign. But instead of
taking a seat in Iraq's Parliament, he has been detained in a secret
location, with no public charges listed against him. Nobody has heard
from him for over a year. Harbi was allegedly able to get his message
out to Allawi while being transfered from one prison to another. Allawi
had his staff fax me a copy of the handwritten letter, which he insists
is authentic. Dated March 24, 2011, it tells a horrific tale.

• • •

The
story of Harbi's arrest was widely reported when it happened. He had
seemed like a paragon of hope for Iraqi democracy. A member of Iraq's
Sunni minority living in the insurgent hotbed of Diyala province, he had
given up a life on the farm to join the political process at a time
when Sunnis were boycotting elections. Harbi became the mayor of his
town, Muqtadiya, and then a leader in the provincial government. He
gained popularity among his constituents for fighting terrorism, working
with both Iraqi and U.S. forces to coordinate counter-insurgency
operations.

Harbi was a collaborator and a traitor in the eyes
of insurgents, who tried to kill him again and again. Many of his
brothers and cousins served as his bodyguards; in all, more than 20 of
his relatives died in bombings and attacks. In September 2009,
terrorists kidnapped his young son and dumped his body in a stream.
Despite the intimidation, and amid constant grief, Harbi continued his
work. At the age of 41, he decided to run for Parliament as a member of
Allawi's electoral coalition, which is avowedly secular but represents
many Sunnis. In the campaign, Harbi spoke out forcefully against both
the abusive practices of the security forces and the controversial
de-Baathification commission -- a committee that had already
disqualified dozens of parliamentary candidates, disproportionately from
Allawi's bloc, for their alleged loyalty to Saddam Hussein's Baath
Party.

After his arrest, Harbi wrote, his captors tortured him
for 97 days, in sessions that lasted 16 hours, "almost to death." They
had a specific demand: "They wanted me to confess that Dr. Ayad [Allawi]
and Dr. Salah [al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni political leader] have
supported me with money to carry out suicide attacks to foil the
government, and to film the confession to be broadcast on satellite
channels before the election." The 14-week torture corresponds roughly
to the time between Harbi's capture and the final certification of the
election results. During this period, Maliki was dedicating much of his
energy to challenging a vote that had given him two fewer parliamentary
seats than Allawi.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki / AP

Allawi believes Harbi has been held in one of
Iraq's secret prisons, run at Maliki's behest. Over the past year,
various investigators -- including the International Crisis Group, Human
Rights Watch, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry, and the Los Angeles
Times -- have discovered that the Prime Minister's office has been
running two covert detention sites, one on a base in the Green Zone
called Camp Honor, another on a base northwest of Baghdad called Camp
Justice. According to Human Rights Watch, which conducted interviews
with former Camp Honor detainees, "interrogators beat them, hung them
upside down for hours at a time, administered electric shocks to various
body parts, including the genitals, and asphyxiated them repeatedly
with plastic bags put over their heads until they passed out." Harbi
does not say where he has been held, only that it was "a place that
could not be described, which no man or animal could bear." In January,
the Los Angeles Times reported that a former Camp Honor detainee had
identified Harbi as a fellow prisoner there in April and May of 2010.
Maliki himself may have alluded to Harbi when, shortly after the
election results were released last March, he referred to Allawi's
allies as "terrorists held in Iraqi prisons."

The letter states
that Harbi's captors have charged him with terrorism in order to keep
him imprisoned and to conceal his torture. Iraqi law gives security
forces broad authority to detain anyone suspected of terrorism, and a
so-called "secret informer law" allows accusers to remain entirely
anonymous. Together, these laws undermine two components of due process
-- habeas corpus and the right of the accused to face the accuser --
often allowing hearsay great influence in the judicial system. In his
letter, Harbi suggests that the testimony against him is coming from
prisoners in Diyala, whom he had once helped Iraqi and U.S. forces to
capture.

Neither Maliki's office nor his Baghdad security
spokesman returned calls asking for comment on Harbi. A U.S. embassy
spokesman referred me to the State Department's latest Human Rights
Report, released on April 8, which refers obliquely to "an orchestrated
political campaign against Sunni politicians from Diyala Province," but
also says that such accusations are "hard to assess."

It's true
that some of Iraq's politicians have been affiliated with insurgents in
ways that probably warrant arrest. A great many more of them are engaged
in corruption of some kind. Moreover, Maliki's political opponents have
an obvious incentive to say he's abusing his power. It's difficult to
distill truth from rumor in a chaotic and opaque post-conflict state.
One former senior U.S. diplomat told me, "We've never been able to put
our thumb on Maliki trying to run a brigade to settle political scores.
If we had, that would be a big deal."

Joost Hiltermann, a Middle
East expert with the International Crisis Group who has extensively
investigated the Iraqi security forces, said it was difficult to know
whether Harbi's qualified as a "big deal" case. "He might well have his
connections [to insurgents], I don't know," Hiltermann told me. "There
is no way of ascertaining this one way or another, especially because we
cannot talk to the man." He emphasized that it was in Maliki's power to
pick up a phone, call his military commanders, and give Harbi his day
in court. "There is no question that these forces [holding Harbi], these
groups report to offices that are directly reporting to Mr. Maliki
himself. Nobody else. And that's the problem."

• • •

Allawi
and Maliki were supposed to be sharing power. The March 2010 elections
had given way to a nine-month stalemate, which ended only after the
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani brokered an American-backed deal to
create a national unity government. Under the terms of that agreement,
signed last November, Maliki would surrender significant authority to a
new high-level policymaking body, which Allawi would chair. This
so-called National Council for Strategic Policy was supposed to be
created in the first month of the government, but Maliki has stonewalled
the initiative. He also agreed to hand control of the counter-terrorism
forces to the Ministry of Defense and to allow layers of civilian and
military command between himself and certain brigades, neither of which
has yet happened. Instead, Maliki has declined to nominate anyone to
lead the Defense and Interior ministries, appointing himself the acting
head of both. As Maliki absorbs more power, it is increasingly difficult
for members of opposition parties to hold him accountable.

"It
is ridiculous to call this power-sharing. It is ridiculous to call it a
coalition government," Allawi told me. "As long as he's not going to
implement [the power-sharing agreement], I'm not going to stay and work
for Mr. Maliki."

Allawi isn't the only opposition leader who's
growing restless. After recent conversations with Barzani and Shiite
political leader Moqtada al-Sadr, Allawi believes Maliki's government
"is showing severe cracks, and people are abandoning this coalition." In
recent weeks, Sadr has mobilized thousands of followers in
demonstrations against the potential extension of Iraq's Status of
Forces Agreement with the U.S. -- something that looks increasingly likely
-- and has warned he would turn against Maliki if the prime minister
allows U.S. troops to stay beyond the end of the year. Barzani, for his
part, is "quite unhappy with the way his initiative has failed," said
Allawi, who flew to Erbil on Tuesday to personally appeal to Barzani to
help pressure Maliki.

The political conflict has spilled onto the
Iraqi streets. Last Friday, an anti-government demonstration at
Baghdad's Tahrir Square turned violent when busloads of men suspected of
being plainclothes security forces showed up with sticks and clubs and
began attacking protesters. Some were reportedly defacing posters of
Allawi. Politicians, too, have lost their cool. Beneath the high
ceilings of the Parliament building's main atrium on Sunday, Kamal
al-Saadi, a leader in Maliki's coalition, began arguing with Haider
al-Mulla, a spokesman for Allawi's bloc, who had apparently called him a
liar. Saadi reportedly got so angry he started beating Mulla with a
cane, until other legislators pulled the two men apart.

Neither
Maliki nor Allawi has tried to lower the temperatures of their
respective blocs. Maliki recently accused Allawi of sabotaging his
initiatives in order to weaken him. Allawi, for his part, seems to be
betting that political conflict will play to his advantage, since
anything that unsettles Maliki's columns of support in the Parliament
will give Allawi an opportunity to build his own power base. "I believe
this summer is going to be very hot," Allawi said.

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